(n.) A mournful or plaintive poem; a funereal song; a poem of lamentation.
Example Sentences:
(1) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
(2) More recently, Iain Sinclair, in his novel Dining on Stones, an elegy to the A13, describes it as: "A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multi-coloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice."
(3) You can contribute questions, comments, predictions, thoughts, premature elegies, over-the-top obituaries or hushed theories about what David Stern has told tonight's officials by emailing them to hunter.felt.freelance@guardiannews.com or tweeting them to @HunterFelt .
(4) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
(5) And yet, the result is exactly the same: a face that is not so much a face but rather a sad elegy for what might have been.
(6) The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone.
(7) The Last Ship is "an elegy for and a celebration of the working-class life of the Newcastle shipyards," according to the Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustis, who says it is "shaping up to be a masterpiece".
(8) "The mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable," said Michael Wood, reviewing American Pastoral in the New York Times , "and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated."
(9) At the centre of the book is a series of intertwined relationships: there are love poems, poems that explore relationships between languages – versions of CP Cavafy from the Greek, poems in Scots, reworkings of New Testament verse – poems about people he knew, such as an elegy for poet Mick Imlah with whom Crawford co-edited an anthology of Scottish verse, as well as poems about the relationship between history and values.
(10) There's a famous passage in John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which retired agent Connie Sachs drifts into a drunken elegy for the young men of the 1950s, the lost souls who fetched up in Smiley's Circus.
(11) The Fix reads only like bitterness, an unconscious elegy to shame; add Iain Duncan Smith's coerced AA meetings, and fair treatment for addicts feels, as ever, far away.
(12) When "Sapho to Philaenis" is set in the context of Donne's other love elegies in verse as productions by a young intellectual moving in sophisticated London circles and writing for a coterie audience, lesbianism looks like a master trope for positively resolving a dilemma that confounded Montaigne and many other authors of the age.
(13) Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence uses Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) to create a haunting elegy for lost youth, with outstanding roles for its leads Edward Watson and Marcelino Sambé.
(14) But with Ukip, it is not just an elegy for a mythical age, but also a call to action.
(15) But when, after a troubled hiatus, he returned to complete the manuscript in 1883, what had begun as a reminiscent celebration became a darker elegy for a lost world.
(16) The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver, Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain in a perennial American elegy.
(17) Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85 Read more I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats: The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
(18) Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies.
(19) Lipton is a Willy Loman for the 21st century, whose song is an elegy for the passing of an American dream – one that told successive generations that, so long as they worked hard and played by the rules, they'd be better off than their parents.
(20) The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression.
Plaintive
Definition:
(n.) Repining; complaining; lamenting.
(n.) Expressive of sorrow or melancholy; mournful; sad.
Example Sentences:
(1) 3.46pm: The Guardian's Dan Sabbagh has just tweeted: Leveson asks Cameron plaintively for political consensus to get reforms through; the PM agrees.
(2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest More critical is Desculpa Neymar (Sorry Neymar) a plaintive critique by Edu Krieger that highlights some of the grievances of the anti-World Cup protests that have taken place across the country since last year.
(3) A quarter of a century after I was hanging around Brent Cross, I was one of the team at the New Economics Foundation on the Clone Town Britain campaign, a plaintive cry against everywhere looking the same.
(4) Mirrors (2016) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Over plaintive piano and a slurry of Trump misogyny, a group of young girls comb their hair before a question is posed.
(5) Without naming and shaming, during the USA's game against Portugal, I saw one leftwing tweeter ask with plaintive, stony-faced sincerity "how can anyone be supporting the imperialists?"
(6) One senior lieutenant made a plaintive call for funds.
(7) Indeed, the running message of the black spider letters is not potency but a plaintive sigh of woe at a world going to the dogs.
(8) The first plaintive cries for Rooney to be brought on could be heard late in the first half.
(9) It’s a fight between what I know my country should be and what I see it turning into, which is the plaintive cry of all American millennials.
(10) And she had just one plaintive answer when I asked how she was.
(11) David Cameron asked plaintively more than once at prime minister's questions.
(12) The news that Facebook has splurged $2bn (£1.2bn) on buying Oculus Rift , the world's first really viable virtual reality headset, has set off waves of plaintive snark in the world of videogames.
(13) asked the Irish Times plaintively, evoking the poetry of WB Yeats from 1913 to grieve over the surrender of Irish sovereignty to a bunch of IMF and ECB accountants.
(14) Search and update are not the same Many a high-profile tweeter has confused the "search" and "update status" boxes, leading to such horrors as @edballsmp's plaintive "ed balls".
(15) The centre posted some before-and-after pictures, along with a plaintive message confirming that someone had recently been up to no good with a brush.
(16) "We need your help," begins the plaintive ad on the front of the Whitehaven News.
(17) There were old men and women, too feeble to walk, who were placed in carts; the younger members of the community on foot were carrying their bundles of clothes … while the children, with looks of alarm, walked alongside … A cry of grief went up to heaven, the long plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach, was resumed … the sound re-echoed through the wide valley of Strath in one prolonged note of desolation".
(18) When Republicans repeatedly get on stage at their national convention and toss attack after attack at my mom,” she wrote in a plaintive letter to supporters, “calling her things I’d never say in front of my children – let alone on live TV – they’re talking about a caricature they’ve imagined, not the woman I love and respect.” As he sought to appear more presidential, even the GOP’s nominee, Donald Trump , seemed embarrassed by the baying crowd, waving aside demands for Clinton’s incarceration with hands that encouraged the mob instead to chant “USA!
(19) he marvels plaintively, pretending to find such interest in him unfathomable. "
(20) The centre posted some graphic before-and-after pictures, along with a plaintive message confirming that someone had recently been up to no good with a brush.